The usual manner of heating the interior of a vehicle during cold weather is by extracting heat from the vehicle's engine. However, in the case of certain vehicles, particularly large vehicles such as school buses running on diesel fuel, this can be unsatisfactory be cause the engine takes time to warm up and, even after the engine has warmed up, insufficient heat is produced by the engine.
This problem of insufficient heat in the interior of these vehicles has continued to plague the vehicle art despite numerous proposals to solve it.
Proposals to solve the problem have included providing separate heat-exchange systems with added pipe configurations to supplement the already-existing engine-coolant heat exchanger. These proposals have not been readily adopted by the art because they require too much modification to the vehicle for implementation, are too complicated to be easily made, are not sufficiently effective or are too expensive in relation to the result achieved.
Consequently, in practical terms, the problem of insufficient heating in vehicles that can cannot be adequately heated by the engine alone has remained until the invention of the present invention.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a heat exchanger and a heat exchange system which is simple to install on a conventional vehicle for the purposes of supplementing the heating of the vehicle by the engine.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a heat exchanger which effectively and inexpensively supplements the heating of the vehicle by the engine.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a heat exchanger which can effectively work off of the same coolant heat-exchange system as does the engine.
Other objects and achievements of the invention will be apparent and be readily appreciated upon reading the rest of the specification.